Web API offers some powerful routing behaviour. Let’s look at how we can use this in our app to avoid needing a new Controller for every Translation we wish to offer (again, ignore the fact our sample is likely only ever to require two way!).

We currently have a single AlphabetToMorseController with our old ITranslator implementation. In the previous tutorial we abstracted our service into an extensible dictionary, this should allow us to take our Translator Key as a routing parameter and our string to translate as a parameter in the URI on our API.

SqlBulkCopyCat is a configurable wrapper around SqlBulkCopy in .NET for SQL Server, born out of a personal frustration at work of being pushed towards using SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) for copying large amounts of data between databases with no real alternative for anything robust without the baggage of taking on SSIS dependencies and the associated bloat in the Development Environment.

As a drummer, Chris Adler of Lamb of God has always been an idol of mine (his signature sticks are my go to), and I’ve been a huge Lamb of God Fan for a number of years now. The story of their front man, Randy Blythe getting arrested on Manslaughter charges on landing in Prague Airport, Czech Republic two years after the alleged incident was truly shocking. His book, Dark Days, recounts the ordeal and offers an insight into his incredibly strong outlook on life and how he made it through the other side.

“We can solve any problem by introducing an extra level of indirection.”

In my experience, this is almost certainly correct, this post will see us adding in an additional layer of Abstraction to allow us to simplify our Controller(s) and manage our Dependencies in a more straightforward manner.

Outcome

Last post saw us implement our Translation PCL into our Web API using Dependency Injection. The problem is that our ITranslator Interface only handles a single Translator Implementation, such that when we inject from our Container we can’t currently translate more than one direction. We’ll look into the why’s shortly, but by the end of the post we will have created :

Portable Class Libraries afford great benefit when it comes to sharing code across platforms/usages. We can share a single library across our UWP App where it’ll run locally and on our Web API where it’ll execute behind our endpoint. Dependency Injection has been made very accessible with the latest ASP.NET MVC Web API.

Outcome

The current MorseCoder.PCL targets only Windows 8.1 as it’s point of API Reference. We’ll need to change that to extend it to the wider .NET Framework (we’re not doing anything prohibitive, so this isn’t a problem). By the end of the post we’ll have updated our PCL to target what we require, and integrated it into the Web API Project using Dependency Injection to pull in an instance of our Translator from the IServiceCollection container.

Bugs

Despite what your boss might like to think, Bugs are a fact of Software. There’s a number of things you can do to minimise the occurrence, the severity and the impact bugs might have, mostly centring around having a reliable set of Unit Tests. Regardless of your best efforts, they will still find a way through the net, it’s how you handle them that matters.

Be Honest

My first piece of advice would be to be honest about them, and the root cause, however embarrassing to you or your team it might be. It’ll be too late to cover it up, so don’t waste your time thinking of excuses. Get to the root cause and come up with a plan to resolve it. If it’s a major problem in Production it’ll be on your shoulders to come up with a strategy to expedite a resolution. Continue reading “Development Team Leadership First Steps : Part 12”